At the risk of thread drift, let me note there's a lot of rose-colored glasses when people look back at the "Good old days" of "simpler rules where you just sat down and PLAYED and you were free to do all the whacky things you wanted without a 'feat' or a 'power' or whatever". The fact is, those memories tend to be due not to the rules being simpler, but to them being so complex player groups ignored the vast majority of them. (Weapon type vs. Armor class, anyone? Wizards rolling for starting spells? For god's sake, the unarmed combat rules?) Not to mention different rules systems for everything -- percentile thieves skills. Listening at doors (but not anywhere else). Surprise. SEGMENTS!
And the whole "We could just do what we wanted" idea tended to mean:
a)There were no rules for it, so no, you couldn't do it. Fighters could not climb walls; only thieves could, and that was that. Clerics could not use a bladed weapon, period. Etc.
b)Every DM had his own personal, idiosyncratic, and often constantly changing house rules/set of guidelines which determined what happened when you went outside the scope of the rules, and there were constant, endless, arguments. Further, games where you had to describe your characters actions ("Tell me HOW you're searching for traps!") instead of assuming your character was, in fact, better trained than you turned into nightmares of having to second- and triple- guess the DM and it didn't matter if Fingers the Thief was 18th level, if YOU couldn't describe how to disable whatever the DM had plucked from Grimtooth's, you were toast.
The best thing about "old school" games was the sense of scope, style, and wonderment. The rules themselves -- especially if we're talking AD&D until Third Edition -- were, let us say, sub par.
